For all of those students who were accepted and decided to attend Ivy League schools, are you happy there? What is the environment/intensity level at your school? I am contemplating applying to some Ivy Leagues, but I don’t want to be miserable and stressed the whole time… In other words, has the prestige of attending an Ivy League been worth it for you?
Most of the people here are high school students, try here. http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/ivy-league/
That would require posting in each university’s forum, which is not allowed. Moved the thread from Financial Aid to College Search and Selection.
The hardest thing about Ivy League is getting in, not staying in. They are famously easy schools once you get in.
I second the motion above…
I chose Penn over several other Ivies and similarly outstanding colleges and I am so grateful that I did. That being said, all top colleges will have both competitive and collaborative students. Your experience to a large extent will be based on the approach you take to college life and the opportunities available to you at your school. You can look at this thread and the threads linked within for stereotypes: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1816751-does-each-ivy-league-school-have-a-general-type-of-personality-p1.html
But stereotypes will not do justice to the experience of actually attending a university.
In my eyes, Penn has an intense yet collaborative environment in which students are dedicated do doing well both inside and outside of the class room. It has a reputation as the Social Ivy because of its vibrant party scene and night life in addition to the dominant culture that emphasizes the importance of socialization in conjunction with one’s traditional education. The Social Ivy vibe also contributes to an unpretentiousness that I always enjoyed. Having four separate but deeply integrated undergraduate schools (Nursing, College, Wharton, and Engineering) leads to an incomparable intellectual diversity but it also creates a somewhat pre-professional vibe on campus due to the nature of the non-College programs. Penn’s campus is 300 acres of beautiful, park-like scenery that feels distinct from the city around it and that facilitates a fulfilling and enriching campus life. Philly is America’s 5th largest city and has all of the art, culture, history, music, restaurants and more that keeps students interested and excited when they do choose to leave campus. There is a natural balance between the campus and the city that allows both to contribute to student life without ever dominating a student’s experience. For me, Penn’s balance of the liberal arts and pre-professional studies, it’s beautiful campus and robust campus life, and its location in a vibrant yet manageable city made it the perfect fit for me. Keep in mind, however, that these are my individual experiences of university life and yours might differ widely if you don’t like cities or you would prefer to avoid the influences of business and engineering curriculums.
The best advice I have is to keep an open mind and avoid getting mired in the pre-conceived notions we have about many of these schools. And finally, no amount of prestige is ever “worth it.” If you aren’t happy in your undergraduate years then you’ve wasted 4 very meaningful years of your life. The prestige should be a factor that contributes to your happiness along with the MANY MANY MANY other facets of the university to which you matriculate.
The happiness of current Ivy League students can be seen from how few transfers are accepted each year.
“The hardest thing about Ivy League is getting in, not staying in. They are famously easy schools once you get in.”
Utter nonsense. The top schools are not easy. They just are filled with incredibly talented overachieving students who, not surprisingly, continue to do well in college even though the coursework is demanding.
This myth is silly.
My daughter’s two friends went to Harvard. They couldn’t get into Pomona and Stanford though. One seems happy but other friend is unhappy with socially. Other friend couldn’t get into UC Berkley but got into Dartmouth, Cornell and Brown. My daughter always wanted to go small LAC so, she is very happy with her LAC. I think you should research each school and chose best fit for you. There are so many great colleges are there not just Ivy League schools.
@ThankYouforHelp I disagree. While I would not say they are easy, they are, by institutional conscription, tailored to foster both cultivation and successful matriculation. So, while they are filled with highly motivated A-types, what you donʻt cite or acknowledge is the educational paradigm which they employ and the exorbitant cost of instruction. By way of specific example, Yale has a high-touch, and invariably high cost model, that makes the actual cost of instruction closer to 150K per student. Each student in the residential college is basically on a status monitor with the master of the respective college, who also coordinates with respective assistant deans, and this is even before you get into the oversight per specific majors. I have had deans tell me verbatim that it is very difficult to flunk out of Yale. So, yes they are smart and industrious, but it comes with a large educational overlay.
Agreed. It’s unfortunate that those with little or no relevant experience are frequently quick to chime in with such rubbish.
Hanna transferred from Bryn Mawr to Harvard and has written about the differences. For example:
@warblersrule Before you throw stones, rampant grade inflation at Ivy League schools has been documented by highly reputable sources of journalism like The Wall Street Journal and The Economist.
The most common grade given in 1950 at Harvard was a C now it is an A.
I have been exposed to students from high caliber schools for years, I know from personal experience.
It’s interesting but probably fruitless to pick apart what reflects grade ‘inflation’ (which implies that the same caliber of work gets better grades) and what reflects changes in competitiveness.
In the olden days (!) a ‘C’ meant that you had an average level of mastery- what most students would be expected to have. Well known prep schools gave Bs and Cs to students who went on to Harvard and other top schools, b/c the standard of work was known and accepted).
But those days have turned into these days, and now adays a ‘C’ means that you have a just about adequate level of mastery, but you would be expected to be able to do better.
Moreover, the applicant pool has changed beyond all recognition, and not even the old ‘feeder’ schools can get away with sending applicants to Harvard with B’s and C’s and expect them to be accepted. The sheer competitiveness of the applicant pool- which, in 1950 was all-male, and dominantly white, Christian, and wealthy- has exploded. The applicant pool for the class of 2019 is many times bigger, as well as more disciplined, focused and driven than the applicant pool for the class of 1950. Is it any wonder that they get better grades?
I didn’t know there was a myth (#7) regarding Ivy League colleges being academically easy. My basic assumption is that there are hard working and intellectually motivated students at a variety of colleges, which would include the Ivy League. However, in the documented cases in which students have gained admission to Ivy League schools through fraudulent means – and therefore were presumably under-qualified by conventional standards – the grades obtained, more or less legitimately, were roughly equivalent to the particular college’s population as whole.
As much as I agree that calling them “easy” is misleading. I will agree that it’s easier to graduate from an ivy league school than it is to get in to one. That’s more a reflection of the fact that they have more qualified applicants than they have seats (such that many capable students are rejected) than a low level of difficulty of the courses.
Edit: and for the record, I absolutely loved my time at Brown. Feel free to look through my posting history.
And we have a similar sentiment here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/03/the-truth-about-harvard/303726/
I am not quite comparing apples to apples (median vs. average), however, these are the best statistics I can find. In 1994 the median SAT score at Yale was 1390, the average test score last year (CR/M) was 1505, not insignificant. Would one expect grades to improve from such an increase in the class? In 1995 they recentered the scores so that could explain some of the difference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT
http://www.prepscholar.com/sat/s/colleges/Yale-SAT-scores-GPA
@warblersrule - Harvard doesn’t take a lot of chances academically. According to collegescorecard, they have one of the lowest percentages of enrolled students from low-income and first-gen families among prestigious colleges in the country:
https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?166027-Harvard-University
A little lower down the pecking order, I think it’s safe to say there is a floor below which no Ivy League (just as no Haverford or Bryn Mawr or Pomona) student would be allowed to fall without all sorts of alarms going off, the main reason being that each student just costs too darned much to allow them to fail.
@lvvcsf the SAT recentering in 1995 added 100 points to student scores. I would say that IS insignificant.
The recentering added 98 points to an average score. As the base figure for conversion gets closer to 1600, the adjustment amount would decrease.